Braised duck or the teochew like to call it, lo ack (which basically means braised duck). I decided that I would learn and make an awesome braised duck yesterday, and that’s exactly what I did today. Thanks to this awesome braised duck video that I saw on YouTube.
Grandma’s recipes. Totally rocks! I decided that I would adapt her recipe to my preference and style of cooking. I like using the thermal cooker, so my recipe works with the thermal cooker.
Are you ready? Here goes!
Recipe
Ingredients
1. Half a duck *chopped*
2. Galangal or blue ginger – 6-7 slices
3. Raw sugar – 4 Tbsp
4. 1 cinnamon stick
5. Dark soy sauce *tai hua brand, standard quality* small bottle can liao
6. 250 ml of water.
Method:
1. Salt the duck lightly and then wash it away. I skipped this step because I found it quite dumb. Plus I didn’t want to waste salt.
2. Heat the sugar in a wok until it turns brown. Make sure it doesn’t burn. So moderating the fire is critical.
3. Dump the pieces of duck into the work and allow the sugar to coat the duck. The grandma video say 8 Tbsp of sugar. I think it is too much, so I used half.
4. After you roughly got some sticky sugar onto the duck, you then add half a bottle of dark soy sauce. Don’t go and buy the big bottle and add half a bottle. It is not the same Ok?
5. Add the sliced blue ginger into the pot. If you don’t like the ducky smell, add more ginger. Or par boil the duck first.
6. Add the cinnamon stick. Then add water. Adjust accordingly.
7. Boil at high heat for at least 15 minutes, then dump the pot into the thermal cooker and allow it to slow cook for at least throughout the day or overnight. Up to you.
I realized while trying to pen down this recipe that there was no way of phrasing this delicacy without murdering the name of the dish. Maybe not murder but definitely it would be a herculean challenge to describe the name in just one language alone or one that everyone would understand.
If I said Kiam Chye Arc, you might think it was a monument of some sort. Or salted mustard duck soup and it might be a tad too literal for some. Furthermore, it might not bring to mind that old familiarity. Or if I were to call it 咸菜鸭, you might wonder why I am writing this recipe in English. Either way it would be best to come to a compromise of terms. So Kiam Chye Duck it is then.
Anyway, this is my first time trying this recipe and according to the law of trying a recipe for the first time, I should really hammer in the works but yet not cloud the original intention of the dish. You got to taste the salted mustard, the indelible flavour of the duck and the sourness of the tomatoes and sour plums. Everyone else in this quintessential Macbeth broth is secondary. Now all you need is a little lightning, thunder and rain and it would be perfect.
Recipe
Ingredients
1. 1 kg or Half a duck *buy from wet market is cheaper*
2. 500 grams of Kiam Chye aka salted mustard
3. Bunch of garlic.
4. 100 grams of ginger *sliced*
5. 4 sour plums *Chinese preserved plums*
6. 3 medium Tomatoes
Method
1. Par boil the chopped duck pieces for about 5 minutes. Discard the water. This is to get rid of scum as duck meat tends to have lots of that. Also it is very oily, so best to boil twice and discard the water.
2. Place the Kiam Chye leaf by leaf into the pot. Cut tomatoes into quarts and dump them in. Dump the garlic in the pot and the sour plums. Dump the sliced ginger into the pot. Once they are all in the pot, make sure the water covers the ingredients.
3. Boil the ingredients in high heat for 15 minutes before putting the pot into the thermal cooker to slowly braise the meat further. By evening it would be ready and delicious.
My all time favourite (I realized I have a lot of favourites!) Bak Kut Teh – home cooked, and very easy to do actually. These days with the easy herbs spice sachets available at NTUC supermarkets, you have no reason not to try it out.
My only issue with these herbs spices is the taste at the end of the day. Sometimes some brands the taste cannot make it. By far red man brand from phoon huat is the best. The blend and taste is really tok kong. So I couldn’t get to phoon huat that day and so I settled for this other brand Seah’s something-something from ntuc.
The taste is not too bad just that I may have added too much garlic perhaps. But it’s so so easy to make. Try it.
Recipe
Ingredients
1. 500 grams of pork ribs *ask the butcher to give you the type for making bak kut teh.*
2. 1 packet of spices *Seah’s*
3. A bunch of white peppercorns.
4. A bunch of garlic 6-7 pieces.
Method
1. Boil a pot of water. Par boil the ribs for about 5 minutes and discard water to remove the scum. Add a fresh container of water. Then continue boiling the pork ribs in the new water.
2. Add the sachet of bak kut teh spices. Add white peppercorns and garlic pieces. You may leave the skins on.
3. Boil for 15 minutes at high heat. Off the fire and place pot of soup into thermal cooker to allow it to continue cooking in the vacuum pot.
4. By evening it would be perfect. Succulent, meat falling off the bone. I still prefer red man bak kut teh spices though. Much nicer.
I have always wanted to cook Rendang. But until now, I never had a good reason to try it nor a good recipe either. We invited some friends over for National Day dinner at our home and naturally I wanted to impress. To do that, I intended to cook a variety of foods to show off my skills. A little bit of Indian cuisine, a little bit of Indonesian and the evening’s menu would be somewhat complete. The only problem now is I have never cooked Rendang before. So this is going to be a little challenging.
Anyway, I already know Mdm Nair’s Fish Curry, so that alone would rock the socks off my friends, that I am very confident. The problem now is to find a recipe for Beef Rendang that would also do the same. A quick look on Google, and I found what would become one of my frequent-cooked recipes. Mrs Russell Wong’s Beef Rendang recipe. The pictures simply ooze flavour and desire. I knew then, deep in my heart, that this recipe would be a keeper. It will definitely make my recipe book.
So I found the recipe on this guy’s food blog, his name is Marc don’t know what, don’t know what. The name’s not really that important as the recipe. Personally I think he puts in a lot of effort into his blog posts, so the only decent thing to do is to acknowledge it and put a link to his site. That would only be the fair thing to do.
So instead of blaring out all the gory details, here’s the link to his site, and you can go discover the story yourselves. Apparently he got the recipe from the wife of Russell Wong (famous Singaporean photographer) and how his wife swears by the recipe. Okay, maybe she didn’t swear, but she might have?
http://norecipes.com/recipe/beef-rendang-recipe/
I take it that you have already tried the recipe and cooked that awesome Beef Rendang. If you saw my ugly photo above, you would probably see something like that as well if you cooked it. The recipe so totally rocks. Delicious, flavourful and not too sweet or salty. Just perfect. I got all my ingredients from NTUC Finest (Bishan) and I must also say, they have everything you would need to make a fabulous Beef Rendang.
This is the invention that I have been waiting for all my life and it is finally here. The Rotimatic. The name in and of itself already conjures images of freshly baked unleavened breads in the comforts of your igloo. Yes, it is possible to use the Rotimatic in an igloo, that’s if you have a power-socket built in. Power-sockets aside, this is one mean unleavened bread machine. The prata man would be proud. So the machine does exactly what it says it would do, and that’s to make roti (unleavened bread).
I can’t imagine why would anyone want to create a machine like this, unless they are catering to the second most eaten food in the world next to rice. Of course the market potential in India alone would be phenomenal and more than reason enough to market and produce for. But these guys are probably eyeing a worldwide market takeover of epic proportions. They want to overtake the rice cooker. And from the looks of it, they just might be able to take up some market share and pinch the rice cooker manufacturers where it hurts.
Here’s a rather sexy video of the Rotimatic in action. Try not to drool.
If you stayed all the way to the end of the video, good for you. I gave up when the lady came on to give the pep talk. If you know where I can get my hands on one, please let me know.
The imagery of how the chef cooked the local delicacy was seared in my memory like a fillet of salmon on a hot griddle. It was undoubtedly any gastronomer’s journey to prepare this dish, like a rite of passage for all aspiring Singaporean cooks and that’s none other than our very own Singapore-styled Chilli Crab. I too decided on that journey recently.
I was at NTUC just taking a walk and wondering at some dinner options. I’m kind of sick of food courts and their exorbitant amounts of MSG (Monosodium Glutamate) and whatever it is that they introduce into the flavours of their dishes. There’s often a dry raspy feeling in the throat and you almost always know that you have just been MSG-ed. No wonder the dubious moniker – Many Sick Gourmets. I was determined to make my own dinner that night.
And there they were all gleaming in their shiny-shell glories. I knew this is the night. I was going to make them mine. But it was a little difficult getting to them at first because there were these foreign talents standing on either side of where the crabs were displayed. They appeared to be browsing, like window shopping. The Indian guys were all discussing dinner options – what to buy; what not to buy. They looked largely undecided with their wide-eyed bewildered expressions. “Great.” I thought, and the aunties on my left were looking rather disinterested, poking at the squids on display as if to test if they were fresh. This was my only chance, I thought and literally threw myself forward and wedged in between them.
Flanked by two of the world’s most populus nations represented here at the seafood section, I felt that I had to grab the opportunity before it all goes away. The mud crabs were looking gloriously fresh, like as if they just stepped out of their sand dunes for a sun-tan, minding their own business and next thing you know they are congregating on ice trays far far away from home. There were a few large ones, perfect for chilli crabs. I made sure i took enough for what I wanted to do. Two mud crabs with a total weight of one point one kilograms. Perfect.
The Chinese ladies on my left started muttering to themselves speaking in their native tongue. “Hey.. look, that man’s buying crabs.. Oh! Look how large they are! Maybe we should buy them as well.. But oh! He’s taking all the big ones..” Needless to say, I was pleased to say the least. The Indian guys on my right were still discussing and still looked undecided. Oh well. No prizes for taking your time dudes.
Preparing chilli crab is just about as difficult as making ice cubes in a tray. It’s pretty much a no-brainer as there are only so many things that could go wrong in the preparation. Like for example, you forgot to pay your monthly gas utility bills and thus there was no gas. Things like that. But other things remaining constant, preparation is a walk in the park. Like I always say. If I can cook, you can cook too.
The other ingredients for the preparation of this particular recipe requires large white onions. These are the kind of onions that they use to cook French Onion Soup. Don’t ask me why they aren’t called French Onions at the shop. I am using three large white onions and four pieces of garlic. Two inches of ginger, and four large red chillis. I couldn’t find red chilli padis at the NTUC as they only had the green ones which weren’t nice. But chilli padis would definitely give it more kick.
A small square of Belachan, which is a fermented mixture of tiny seafoods like shrimps, squids and other microbiotic creatures, is needed. Some background on Belachan. Apparently some fisherman in Malaysia once found a puddle of prawns and squids rotting with maggots and there was an awful stench coming out from it. Undaunted by the smell, he brought it back home and cooked it for the family and ironically they loved it. In fact their food was so fragrant that the neighbours wanted to know what secret ingredient that they were using that night. And that kind of got him thinking that this could be a multi-million dollar business – selling rotting carcasses of tiny sea creatures to the world. Brilliant!
I use canned tomato paste and tomato puree as they offer a nicer texture to the taste of the chilli crab. Less of the artificial flavouring that you would get if you dumped three bottles of Maggi Tomato Sauce as some are fond of doing. It’s too much salt I think. You can choose from any of the brands but personally I think Hunt’s is a good brand. So all that’s left is basically the way of doing this. This is where i will use my trusty kenwood food processor to help me in the preparation. If you don’t have one of these, you should really consider getting one. It can chop, cut, dice, mash. Whatever you want.
Firstly put in the white onions, blend it, then put in the garlic, ginger and chillis.. continue to blend until it’s a pulpy texture..
Then chop and wash the mud crabs, breaking them into pincers, and mids.. reserving the eggs. (if any)
After this, you’re ready. Fire up the wok with about five tablespoons of oil. Once heated, spoon the blended paste to fry till fragrant. Then add in the Belachan and a bowl of water. After which you add in the tomato paste and puree and continue frying. Add in a tablespoon of light soy sauce. Once that’s done, you can throw (literally) the crabs into the wok and fry.
This is where you should also add in three tablespoons of Shao Xing Hua Tiao Jiu aka chinese cooking wine. Throw on the lid and let the spicyness of the mixture fuse with the juicy freshness of the crabs. Then let it simmer for about five minutes and you are just about done. Crack in an egg or two and a little parley for garnishing. Easy!
My romance with Indian food is like an endless bollywood dance. One day, when I have my own food travel show, I will visit India. Maybe my first stop in India would be Kerala. I heard that it is the place for all kinds of spices, kind of like a spice garden. It is like spice capital of India where traders from all around would gather and peddle their wares. I can imagine the marketplace to be perfumed with the scent of exotic spices.
But for now, I will just have to be content with what I smell at the Mama store, or the supermarket.
Anyway, I said all that to say that I love fish curry. The best fish curry in my humble opinion is the one that my friend Mdm Nair taught me. I still remember that Saturday morning in a crowded room with neighbourhood aunties and maids, she revealed her recipe for greatness. The fish curry was fabulous. Since those early days, I have been making Mdm Nair’s Fish Curry much to the delight of my Indian friends who tasted it. They say that it has a very Indian taste, whatever that means.
Where to shop?
The Mama’s Store has everything. The spices, the vegetables, everything is there except for the fish. As for the fish, you can get it at the wet market, or supermarket.
Recipe
Ingredients
Whole Fish (Angoli) 1 pc, 1 kg – (or you can use stingray, I prefer that.)
Red Chilli Paste 3 tbsp
Fish Masala Powder (Baba’s Brand) 6 tbsp
Mixed Spices (Brarath Brand) 2 tbsp
Ladies Fingers 10 pcs
Beef Tomatoes 4 pcs
Onions (sliced) 2 bulbs
Garlic (sliced) 4 bulbs
Fresh Green Chilli (sliced, seeds out) 1 pc
Tomato Puree (Gilda Brand) 1 can
Tamarind (Assam) 1 packet – (you can now get a smaller packet size, in which case it will be the whole portion.)
Carnation Milk 1 can – (I don’t really use that, so that’s optional.)
Curry Leaves 1 sprig
Salt
Oil
To Marinate:
1. Salt the fish for at least half an hour. Then wash and cut the fish into pieces. Mixed 03 tablespoons (tbsp) red chilli paste and 02 tbsp fish masala powder. Add a bit of salt and mixed with fish.
2. Take half packet of the tamarind and soak in half a bowl (5 cups) of water for half an hour.
3. Strain the tamarind and throw away the seeds. Put the tamarind water in a bowl and add 04 tbsp of fish masala powder, 03 garlic and 01 fresh green chilli and a bit of salt and stir.
Method:
1. Heat up the pan with oil. Fry ladies fingers till light brown and keep aside. Add mixed spices (02 tbsp), onions (chopped), 1 garlic (sliced), curry leaves till light brown and add tomatoes and fry till tomatoes are soft. Add the tamarind water with masala together with the earlier ingredients and stir. Close the lid until it boils.
2. Add ladies fingers, 1 tbsp of tomato puree and fish. Then add carnation milk (to thicken the curry). Leave for 5 minutes. Serve with white rice or Korean Instant Noodles.
The wifey broke my sleep and woke me up to the new dawn. She mumbled some words to which I had to say a “har?”. Maybe my brain is slow at processing slur words. So I asked her again, and it was then that I realized that she wanted me to cook one of my fabulous soups *shines fingernails*.
Alright, that shouldn’t be a problem, I thought to myself, making soups in the wee hours of the morning has now become my specialty. The only hurdle between me and making soup these days is probably the waking up part. It has been been a challenge since I got rid of that ridiculous cock-crowing ringtone which apparently irritated the entire population in my cluster; it also irritated my wife as well. So the ringtone had to go. Now in its place is this very zen and space-like ringtone named neon.
It’s not the John Mayer kind of neon with his signature slap and pluck style of guitar playing. But it was more like a vibrating double-stringed instrument sounding more like a cricket’s mating call. Very alien. Unfortunately it was also quite soft and good for if you wanted to continue to sleep.
“I already placed the black chicken in the sink.” came the voice in my semi-state of galactical subconsciousness. It was as if the voice transcended space and time to speak to me. “wake up lah.” My wife slapped my shoulder. Just as quickly my subconscious mind returned to full consciousness albeit my eyes still glued-closed due to excessive secretion of the tear duct (heaty?).
I peered into my mobile phone and it was just nice, one minute before neon; one minute before the new dawn. Now my quest can begin.
So to make black chicken soup the quick and dirty way, you really need a packet of dun ji tang herbs from the supermarket. This is the proven method of making the delicious soup. But the problem now is I am all out of the herbs! Jialat!
I really need to quickly summon my creative culinary powers in order to make sense of this newfound dilemma. Thankfully I always keep a stash of my favorite generic condiments somewhere, always ready to be deployed in any crisis of a lack of dun ji tang herbs.
Recipe
Ingredients
2 bottles of Brand’s Essence of Chicken
5 pieces of Japanese dried scallops
5 pieces of dried red dates
25 pieces of wolfberry seeds
Method
1. Par boil the chicken pieces to get rid of the scum.
2. Add in new water (not newater) and begin boiling. Add the chicken essence. Dump the condiments into the pot and close the lid.
3. After boiling for 10 minutes, place the pot into the thermal cooker and walk away. Serve at night when you return from work.
Day four of the new dawn. I could hear the crackling of thunder not too far away. When I looked out of the window, flashes of lightning lighted the twilight sky. It’s gonna be a good day today. I have always loved raindrops on the window of my Aircon bus.
Good days therefore deserves a good pot of soup. I decided that Herbal Black Chicken Soup would really make the day even more special. Don’t worry, baby won’t be partaking in this soup. I will be making plain porridge with minced pork and marmite for him. I know he sure like wan.
So just nice the black chicken would be so totally perfect for dinner. The wife even asked for a bowl when she returns home. I bought the herbs the day before at NTUC and I was sure the end result would be a perfect bowl of soup.
I was right.
Where I shop?
I got my black chicken from the wet market. There is something more fresh about buying fresh meats from the wet market. Okay, I needed to say that. Of course if there wasn’t a wet market around where I lived, I would have gone in search of one. Fresh meats are more fresh at the wet market (myth#1).
The herbs I got from NTUC. Once I heard from a friend that her child asked her..
Child: “mama, is there a giant in the supermarket?”
My friend thought to herself and polled Facebook for an answer on how to reply the child.
Me being the good-hearted person replied..
Me: “that’s not a problem, wait till she asks you if there is a National Trade Union Congress in the supermarket. That would require much more explanation.”
Okay, that was a lame supermarket joke.
Recipe
Ingredients
1 Black Chicken chopped into 4 parts
1 Packet of Dun Ji Tang herbs
2 bottles of Brands Essence of chicken
Method
1. Dump (I love the word!) the black chicken into the pot. Par boil it and then discard the water. Fill it up again.
2. Dump the herbs into the pot. Turn high heat and boil (bubbling) for 15 minutes. Switch off and load the pot into the thermal cooker.
This is my second time eating at this nonya food establishment, if I can call it that. My first impression of it was that they were more like fast food, quick nonya peranakan eats for the modern gourmand in a hurry. Perhaps that’s the niche that they set themselves to serve.
Their meals are cooked communally in the pot with the sides cooked at the sides (pun intended). It’s actually a very open and simple set up. The eatery whips up traditional peranakan favourites in a matter of minutes. In fact they have managed to piecemeal the entire preparation process to the critical five minutes. That’s about as much time anybody on a tight lunch hour would give any one eatery. It’s like make it in five minutes if you want me to patronize your stall again. Ironically peranakan cuisine is not known to be associated with quickness or smart culinary short cuts.
Most of their foods are typically cooked and stewed over long periods. So to have it prepared in five minutes, something’s gotta give.
In this case, I suspect it’s the quality. But even more interestingly they have somehow managed to ensure that that was not compromised. So it is nice to know that they care about their foods as much as they cared about their bottom-line.
I had their Ayam Buak Keluak which is a traditional favourite that is synonymous with peranakan cuisine. Do this right and you can assume that everything else in the shop will carry that old familiar flavour. The chicken is of course well cooked but not to my liking which kind of shows the level of skill of the cook. The Buak Keluak was excellent. I don’t remember the taste so vividly with the other peranakan restaurants but O’nya has set the standard for me. Everything else is forgivable. Ha! All in, they have managed to retain the flavour of peranakan cuisine, and that is a good thing.
There’s one outlet at Tampines Mall that I went with colleagues. I think I might go there again to try something else. Maybe the rendang.
Day three of the new dawn. I am tired. My lifeforce seems to have been zapped by some mysterious incubus. Either that or I am still riling over the fact that baby didn’t like my black bean porridge that I made yesterday.
Maybe he wasn’t accustomed to the taste as yet; maybe it was his first time trying it. I have come to realize that kids take a while to like something. It was the same experience with ice cream. At first he didn’t like it. Now he does.
So maybe one day he will develop a penchant for my black bean soup. I spent quite a bit of time cooking his porridge last night, and used quite a bit of the soup to cook it as well. *Grr* I think he kind of humored me a little and ate some at the beginning but I guess the taste was too foreign for his liking.
So today, I decided that I would make ABC soup again. Actually I wanted to make chicken soup, but since I already started defrosting the ribs last night by mistake – I decided to heck it. Chicken soup can be for tomorrow. Or maybe tomorrow can be lotus root, peanut and pork ribs soup. Hmmm..
I also realize by now that I may have overbought my ingredients for the week’s cooking rituals. There is no way that I can finish cooking all that I bought for the week, by the end of the week. I need to buy less. I also realize that it is near impossible to cook for baby without eventually cooking the same stuff for myself. Ok, I admit I have been lazy.
If you want my recipe for my ABC soup. You can check my post soup for three. Baby loves ABC soup.
Day two of the new dawn. Still no twilight vampires or werewolves. I got up early to make my soup of the day. The very Chinese Black Bean, Radish and Pork Ribs Soup. This should be good. I can already imagine how it would and should taste like by tonight. The tenderising effect of the thermal cooker is not to be discounted. I mean what goes on within the pot is just simply amazing. The pork ribs will be tender, the vegetables soft and everyone just so delicious.
I usually don’t salt my soup when cooking them, just so as not to complicate the natural flavours of the ingredients. There must always be clarity in whatever soup we do. So when the soup is ready to be consumed, I must be able to tell the ingredients apart upon tasting, most importantly I must be able to enjoy my soup. Salt tends to confuse our tastebuds. That said, I usually add a pinch of sea salt just before serving for that little bit of taste. Like her friend garlic, salt can only be servant to the dish, but never a master – that’s only if you aren’t making salt-baked chicken.
So I decided that I would try out my own rendition of this classic soup. I tried searching for a video on YouTube using the keywords “black beans and pork ribs” – but to no avail. It seems that Asian cooks aren’t so keen on taking videos of their cooking as compared to some really awful videos of cooking processes. Those are not cooking demonstrations IMHO – they are more like sanctifying rituals of epic proportions. One moment is do this, set apart that, next is remove this, reserve that. I mean, how is anyone going to learn how to cook anything if the ingredient list is so technical and most of them sound as if we have to climb a mountain to pluck it.
Practicality and simplicity should be what cooking is all about. Soups should be simple three to four ingredients – that’s it!
Anyway, before I get carried away, my version of the black bean soup is nothing short of simple. Try it!
Recipe
Ingredients
250 grams Black Beans
250 grams Pork Ribs
1 large White Radish
4 Dried Scallops
Method
1. Par boil the pork ribs to remove scum. Slice radish into quarts and dump them into the pot. Then dump all the black beans into the pot as well. Drop 3-4 dried scallops to flavour the soup.
2. Fill the pot with water until all ingredients are covered. Turn on high heat for about 15 minutes. Once the soup is boiling and bubbling, turn off the fire and place the pot in the thermal cooker.
Note:
If you are unsure of how the thermal cooker looks like, I have a photo appended.
Today my colleagues and I went to EAT to eat Bak Chor Mee. We really love eating it at EAT. However, it was not to be so at EAT today when we ate it at EAT. There seemed to be something quite wrong with the EAT BCM noodle master’s powers of estimation.
I asked for BCM but I also wanted to add fish cake, thinking that it was going to be the deep fried fish cake that they sell on the side. I love the EAT deep fried fish cakes by the way, they are excellent, even on their own. The stall lady asked me how much fish cakes I wanted to add and suggested a top up of a dollar. I thought it was fine to add a dollar’s worth of deep fried fish cake.
To my dismay and much disappointment, the fish cake that the noodle master gave me was a mere four slices of the delicacy. I had a shocked when he presented the completed product to me and I could only let out a futile yelp of despair.
I had to portray exactly what $1 of fish cake was worth at EAT or else you might think I was joking and trying to pull a fast one. What you see in the picture above is one dollar’s worth of fish cake. Wow.
Either inflation has swept through Singapore right under my nose or the noodle master had something against customers who liked adding fish cakes to their BCM. Maybe it was against internationally acceptable BCM standards to not have fish cakes added into BCM. Maybe his strict adherence to this rule might have had some manner of impact on his sense of duty in the guild of international noodle masters that caused his deft fingers to show great restraint when scooping the fish cakes into my bowl.
Our favourite soup. I guess it is favourite because it is the only soup that I can remember how to make at the snap of the finger. For the other recipes, I can’t seem to recall for some very strange reason. I could only conclude that this was the soup of the day and that I should therefore cook it. Not such a big decision anyway.
A simple soup or four ingredients of corn, carrot, potatoes and pork ribs. My wife calls it ABC soup but I struggled with that definition. As far as the soup is concerned, it should be abbreviated as PPCC or CCPP or PCCP (you get the idea), so maybe I will refer to my own abbreviation for convenience.
Maybe it is so easy to make that some folks might have said that it was as easy as ABC. Okay, that I agree. It is so easy you could train a monkey to do it.
Recipe
Ingredients
1 ear of Corn
1 large Carrot
3 medium Potatoes
250 grams of lean Pork Ribs
Salt
Method
1. Par boil the pork ribs just so to remove the scum. This is good practice so that you only get the good stuff. Don’t boil too long or you might lose all flavour.
2. Slice carrots, corn and potatoes and then dump it into pot. Fill with water until it covers ingredients. Turn on high heat. Boil for about ten to fifteen minutes with lid on.
3. Then place pot into thermal cooker (no electricity needed) and let it cook for the rest of the day. I use a thermal cooker because the meats are tenderized and the vegetables are sufficiently cooked without disintegrating into the soup. For all my morning soups, I use the thermal cooker. It’s great!
4. When you are about to serve, add salt to taste. Easy!
My wife taught me this recipe one day and I thought it to be one of the best recipes ever. I love drinking lotus root soup but I never heard of a sweetened version of this delicious root. It’s really simple to prepare. The recipe is so simple that you would be shock to learn it.
In her words, “just dump the lotus root in water, boil and add sugar.”
For the sake of our puritan traditionalist readers, I will make the recipe a little more complicated so that it looks and sound legit. I understand how you guys think.
So to make it easy (or complicated) for you guys, I managed to find an awesome YouTube video on how to boil this delicious Lotus Root drink. The only problem is, there is no such recipe online for a sweetened version of the Lotus Root!
I fired up YouTube and searched the following keywords “sweet lotus root drink recipe” and it yielded a whole slew of salty versions of the Lotus Root Soup with other condiments. I thought, perfect right? Since I needed to make this recipe complicated. So here goes, just for you guys..
Cool right?!
I think the above video on how to prepare Lotus Root Soup totally rocks.
Now how does that video relate with what I am trying to teach my readers. Well it is simple, let me teach you how to use the video to achieve what I want to share with you. Firstly disregard everything that the video tells you to prepare and only remember the Lotus Root. Slice it like the way the person do it. That’s the most important part. Everything else that the person does in the video you can disregard since my wife’s recipe doesn’t require them.
Now imagine there are pandan leaves in the video. You can replace the carrots with images of pandan leaves. If you can’t imagine, just google “pandan leaves” – then take a long hard look at the leaves and quickly switch over to the video and imagine the carrots to look like the pandan leaves. I tried it, and it works.
So my little addition to the recipe is to add pandan leaves into the lotus root drink and basically that’s it!
Where I shop?
The best place for Lotus Root is really the wet market where you can find the freshest of groceries in the entire housing estate. The softer alternative is to go get it at the supermarket. I often choose NTUC because it is the nearest to my place. So you can choose whichever resource you like, as long as you get the right item. Then probably a few baskets away, you will also find the pandan leaves. Easy.
Recipe
Ingredients
A few tubes of Lotus Roots
1 bunch of Pandan Leaves
Rock Sugar
Method:
1. Wash the mud off the Lotus Root, scrub the root and then shave off the skin of the root. Then slice it into half a centimetre slices.
2. Put the sliced Lotus Roots into a pot of water and turn on to high heat. Add the pandan leaves in knotted bunches into the pot. Boil until you smell the fragrance of the pandan leaves. Taste test the broth, and see if you are able to taste the faint flavour of the Lotus Root. If so, it should taste like Lotus Root.
3. Add the rock sugar. This is when the magic happens. Sweetened it until it is almost just right sweetness. If just right sweetness is 100%, then you should sweeten it until it is about 80% sweetness.
4. Taste test the Lotus Root Broth now, and you will experience hints of Sugar Cane and Water Chestnuts as well. Interesting right? I knew you would love this recipe.
Is it really a soup? Or is it really a dessert? But why do people call it Red Bean Soup and not Red Bean Dessert? I guess people probably do, just that I have also heard some folks say Red Bean Soup. I never questioned the intention behind calling it, but I guess I will call it Red Bean Broth. Just for fun. I mean who cares right?
Anyway, I have been cooking quite a couple of desserts lately, and this is something that I thought would really rock as an inclusion into my pseudo recipe e-book that I intend to release at a future date. A blogger’s got to make some money somewhere down the road right?
Anyhoo, so I decided that I would cook Red Bean Broth *wide grin* and I would do it the traditional “kick-ass” way that would rock the socks off any old-school grandmother dessert expert. So here goes..
Oh before I start, incidentally I found a pretty good (and short) video recipe of Red Bean Soup that I thought was pretty decent – I think most of us have trouble reading recipes, so a video presentation is needed to help us who are more attuned to visual learning – learn. Good thing is, there are a gazillion videos on YouTube that helps us understand different things easily. This video on Red Bean Soup really helped me, and I am sure it will also help you as well.
When you watch the video, read my blog post and just pretend that it is me showing you how Red Bean Soup is cooked.
Where I shop?
I do all my shopping at NTUC Fairprice usually, but on this occasion I went to NTUC Finest, and I realised that they have some things that the regular ones don’t and at the same time, the regular ones have the things that they don’t carry as well. Say like never say right?
Recipe
Ingredients
250 grams Organic Red Adzuki Bean (I heard that these beans are better than the regular sized ones)
1 Bunch of Pandan Leaves
Rock Sugar
3 bulbs Fresh Lily Bulb
2 packets Fresh Gingko Nut
100 grams China Barley
Method:
1. I know the video tells you to soak the Red Beans overnight. You can follow the video if you like, or you can follow what I did. I just dump the 250 grams of organic red adzuki beans into a pot of water as well as dumped the bunch of pandan leaves into the pot. Turn the heat up and start boiling. Red Beans for some strange reason takes a longer than usual time to break down or become nuah (soften) so if you think that this is going to be a walk in the park – think again. Or maybe take a walk in the park while it boils. <– not a good idea by the way.
2. Boil until the red beans starts to look as if they are soften and the broth becomes a dark murky reddish colour. This is perfectly okay by Red Bean Broth standard. Red Bean is supposedly heaty(is there another way to say heaty?) so with the addition of the China Barley, which actually has a cooling effect on the body, helps to neutralise the heatiness (is there another way to say heatiness?) So in a sense after you add this and that, it kinds of helps maintain-the-balance.
3. So while the Red Beans and Barley are getting to know each other a little better in the now very hot pot. We should also be smelling the sweet fragrant aroma of the pandan leaves (screwpine) screwing with your nasal cavities and arousing a sense of bewilderment that only an Eskimo would understand. Like I said, boiling Red Beans takes a while, especially if you didn’t follow the video to soak the beans overnight, so you got to entertain yourself while the beans dance the cha-cha.
4. Once the beans are almost softened, take out the pandan leaves and discard. Add the fresh gingko nuts and fresh lily bulb to cook. As the latter ingredients are fresh, you don’t need to cook them for very long, especially the lily bulbs. They tend to melt under extreme heat, so you don’t want to have no lily bulbs when you do serve the broth.
5. Add rock sugar lastly until you feel that it is of the right sweetness, and then you can call all your hungry friends to chow down.
Here is an all time favourite local dessert eaten by virtually anyone, and most people will tell you how difficult it is to cook this delicacy and that you would need to spend a lot of time cooking it etc. Well, half of what people tell you is true, all the other stories are mostly not true.
Let me show you how easy it is to cook this and if I can do it, you can also.
Fortunately for those that need a little more visuals, I found a really good video on YouTube that we can all follow. See Toh from Makansutra does it really well. You can follow his instructions and ingredient list if you like, or you can follow my no frills method.
I shop and got all my ingredients from the dry goods section at NTUC Supermarket.
Recipe
Ingredients
250 grams Mung Beans or Green Split Beans (don’t ask me why they are called Green when they are actually Yellow)
1 bunch of Pandan Leaves
Rock Sugar
Sweet Potato Flour
Method:
1. You may rinse the mung beans if you like. Most people do this until the water is clear. If you ask me why do people do that, I will tell you that it is totally unnecessary. Why make your life so difficult? Just dump the entire 250 grams into the pot and fill it up with 1.5 litres of water.
2. Wash and twist pandan leaves into two or three bunches. Dump the bundles into the pot of water with the mung beans. Boil until mung beans are jumpy and dancing in the pot. Sing twinkle twinkle little stars.
3. Walk twenty metres away from the pot and stay there. When you start to smell the pandan flavour from 20 metres away, chances are it is almost done. Walk back to the pot and remove the pandan leaves. By now the water should be a watery yellow in colour. You can take a few beads of mung beans and test them for softness. If the required texture is achieved which is basically softened mung beans, you can proceed to add the flour mixture.
4. This is when you mix your sweet potato flour in a bowl of cold water until it is a milky mixture. Slowly pour it into the boiling mung bean broth and stir until it thickens into a starchy mixture. If you have poured the entire bowl into the pot and it is still not starchy like the usual tau suan texture, then feel free to mix some more and continue to pour into the pot.
5. Once ready, add some You Tiao or fried dough fritters, and you can eat. If you’re looking for Halal dough fritters, Old Chang Kee sells them but only in the morning. And don’t forget to add the rock sugar! Add until it is just about starting to be sweet then stop.
Today was one of those “I need to eat Nasi Lemak” days.. We went to our usual Coffee and Toast place but the lady said their supply “not here yet”..
Frantically we went to Ya Kun and the lady over there shook her head as well. Then we finally came to Toast Box and they had one of the best Nasi Lemak money can buy at that point in time. Sometimes when we are wrought for choice we tend to accept whatever sub-standard derivative of the product that we can find to satisfy the cravings.
Thankfully not today. We were greeted with delicious hot steaming coconut infused rice and crispy ikan bilis, sunny side up and delicious chicken wings.
This compared to the usual cold dry Nasi Lemak that we usually get. It was a welcome change. A little pricey though but for the difference it is just right.
I have always loved Prawn Noodles and for a long time now I have always wondered what it was that was included in that special broth that is synonymous with great tasting soup. I think it is largely monosodium glutamate is we were to consume the Prawn Noodles at the coffee shop or the hawker centre. But what if we were to try out that old local favourite at home? Would we do it the same way?
I chanced upon a packet of Prawn Noodle mix by Ah Hai (can find at NTUC) and at first glance, I thought that it was just another pre-mix recipe that will probably yield some salty end result. That may be true for some, but I decided to give it a try anyway, and it was one of the best decisions I made (alright you know I am exaggerating a little. This is Prawn Noodles that I am talking about.)
Most people would think that the pre-mix package is probably not good, and probably not great. But it was all good for me. The taste was just right. In fact I went on to make a fresh version of Prawn Noodles eventually, and it tasted just as good. But here is the recipe that I did for the Ah Hai’s Prawn Noodle paste. Enjoy.
Recipe – Serving for four
Ingredients
8 Prawns (Large)
Egg Noodles (500g)
Kang Kong (one bunch)
Bean Sprouts (one bunch)
Yakibuta (prepared separately) [optional]
Fish Cake (1 pc)
Red Chilli (1 pc)
Ah Hai’s Instant Prawn Noodle Paste (1 packet)
Method
1. Cut off the heads of the Prawns and fry the heads in a large pot with a little oil. Fry till fragrant.
2. Pour Ah Hai’s Instant Prawn Noodle Paste (NTUC sells it) into pot and pour in 2 litres of water. Bring to a boil and keep it at medium heat for 30 minutes.
3. Sieve the broth and pour into another soup pot. Blanch the egg noodles, Kang Kong, Bean Sprouts and Prawns in hot water.
4. Place all the cooked ingredients into a bowl and ladle the steaming hot broth into the bowl. Serve with Red Chilli in dark soy sauce. I use Yakibuta as opposed to the traditional Pork Ribs simply because it is tastier.
Bon Appetit!
Bonus Recipe:
Yakibuta – Japanese Char Siu
Ingredients
Pork Belly (300gm)
Shao Xing Cooking Wine
Mirin (Japanese Sweet Wine)
Light Soy Sauce
Dried Kelp
Method
1. Sear the Pork in the bottom of a pot and allow the sides of the meat to cook. Be careful not to cook the meat for too long.
2. Add in the Shao Xing Wine (1 cup), Mirin (3 Tbsp), Light Soy Sauce (3 Tbsp) and fill with water until liquid slightly covers pork. Add in the Dried Kelp. Bring to a boil and cook the meat over a slow fire for about an hour. Use a wooden skewer to test for doneness.
3. Slice the Pork Belly and decorate over Ramen noodles or in this case, Prawn Noodles.
It was what someone said was a very third world spring chicken. To be exact, there was very little spring left in the chicken and most of it was sinewy muscle and crispy skin.
I wasn’t sure if I was eating chicken or some oily puff with chicken flavour. By the time I was done with the meal, I had felt inundated with recycled oil. I have tasted better western foods but this was presented in a manner that left me desiring for something else.
Ok, perhaps you might think I am being picky but to put things into context, I did pay for the meal. And for good money too. The coleslaw was unremarkable and the fries were just a small helping as if it they were rationing their condiments.
It looked ok in the photo but it tasted just plain in reality. Well that was one meal that I didn’t really enjoy. It was just food as they say.
Bananas are great for a lot of ailments like constipation or if you just generally want to eat it as a snack. My baby loves the banana and it’s great as a snack and it helps him with his poo poo too.
We like getting the local variety which is the small type because it is handy for kids and it is not too much to munch on. Great for when we are out for our meals and we want to give him a healthy snack. These miniatures are fantastic.
After a brief hiatus since my last post, I thought it is about time to share some new recipes that I have been working on.
Here’s my favourite laksa recipe of all time. Tedious to make, but guaranteed satisfaction for all of you Laksa lovers.
The ingredients are commonly found in NTUC or Cold Storage, so ingredient list building shouldn’t be a problem. Perhaps some of you experts out there might question “why no belachan?”, well I decided not to use belachan because good quality dried shrimp is good enough, but you may consider that if you like.
Ingredients:
Vermicelli aka Laksa Bee Hoon – 500 grams
Medium Grey Prawns – 250 grams
Fish Cake – 1 large piece
Bean Sprouts – 1 handful
Dried Tau Pok – 10 pieces
Blood Cockles – 200 grams
Laksa Leaves – 1 sprig
Dried Shrimps – 1 cup
Cooking Oil – 100 ml
Water – 750ml
Coconut Milk – 250 ml
Salt
Sugar
Pound into Paste:
Shallots (or Onions) – 2/3 Bulbs
Garlic – 4 pieces
Turmeric (Yellow Ginger) – 1 inch
Galangal (Blue Ginger) – 1 inch
Young Ginger – 1 inch
Candlenuts – 4 pieces
Dried Chillis – 10 pieces (soak in water first)
Ginger Mix
Fish Cake
Fresh Prawns
Pounded Dried Shrimp
Dried Shrimps
Laksa Thick Bee Hoon
Laksa Broth
Coconut Milk
Dried Bean Curd
Method:
1. Blanch prawns in 750 ml of water till 90% cooked. I gauge this cooking process by looking at the prawns and if they curl into a “C” shape. “C” means cooked, but if however, the prawns turn into an “O” shape, then that means the prawns is now over-cooked. Just a little tip for all of us servant-less cooks.
2. Once prawns are cooked, set them aside.
3. Add Laksa leaves into the broth, and bring to a boil. You can also shred the Laksa leaves to sprinkle over your noodles for that extra flavour.
4. Then turn the fire to a low simmer for about 15 minutes.
5. Heat 100 ml of oil in a wok.
6. Add in dried shrimp (pounded) into pounded condiments (paste) and fry for 5-7 minutes over a big fire until fragrant.
7. Pour the cooked ingredients into the pot of prawn stock. Again, bring to a boil.
8. Add in the coconut milk to thicken the broth. Add salt and sugar to taste.
9. Add in the Tau Pok (sliced diagonally) to cook until soft if you like, before serving.
Serving Suggestion:
1. Present cockles, bean sprouts, fish cakes (sliced) and tau pok (cooked) in a bowl of Bee Hoon Noodles before ladling the Laksa broth over the ingredients.
2. Sprinkle Shredded Laksa leaves for extra flavour.
If there is such a thing as comfort food, then mine would be fish sliced bee hoon soup with thick white bee hoon. Here’s a recipe for fish sliced bee hoon soup that I think will rock your socks off. This is why I think this recipe so totally rock. This is a recipe that’s been tweaked to my liking.
* please note that I have included amazon affiliate links to the products I use, so check them out if you wish to support me, and if I can get these items from NTUC Supermarket, I would just indicate.
Fish slices (fried):
Ingredients:
Fish *Use Angoli* 500g (Angoli is Hokkien for Sea Bream and not to be confused with Red Snapper which is known as Ang Kway in Hokkien which literally means Red Chicken, don’t ask me why)
Sea salt(alternatively, you could consider what I use instead, which is the TADKA brand Himalayan Pink Salt [NTUC])
Chicken Stock Powder(I use Knorr Chicken Stock[NTUC] most of the time for this as it’s really the best, mum uses it for her cooking, and I use it as well)
Egg(one)
Potato starch(any brand will do, even the house brand from NTUC)
Shao Xing Hua Tiao Jiu(there are many varieties and brands that you can find at NTUC, but the brand that I like best is the Pagoda Hua Tiao Chiew, it’s the most expensive bottle with similar looking bottle branding)
White pepper
Method:
1. Cut the Angoli into thin slices about 1cm thick and then salt lightly, leave it to marinate for about 30 minutes. If you don’t like your fish to be too salty, you can wash it after marination.
2. Then prepare 5 tablespoons of potato starch *use measuring spoons* and crack an egg into it. Put half a teaspoon of chicken stock and half a capful of hua tiao jiu, white pepper and then whisk with a fork into a smooth creamy mixture.
3. Then dip the fish slices into the mixture and deep fry it over low heat, this is to ensure that the fish is cooked while the batter doesn’t burn – you want the fish slices to taste cripsy, not rock solid. Also not having a big fire ensures even cooking.
4. Fry till light brown *not too long* as fish cook easily, the texture should be just right, and the fish is not cooked too long. The taste should be soft and juicy and the batter gives it a nice crunchy texture.
Fish Soup:
Ingredients:
Sea salt (you can omit this and use chicken stock only)
Salted vegetables (Kiam Chye)
Sour plum (preserved salted sour plums)
Carnation milk (if you like)
Tomatoes (quartered)
Spring onions (cut into 2cm lengths)
Ginger (thinly sliced)
Method:
1. Bring about 1.5 litres of water to the boil, and add either 1 teaspoon of salt or chicken stock. I use salt instead because I am using salted vegetables for flavouring already, you can use chicken stock if you’re not adding salted vegetables an alternative vegetable is szechuan vegetables as it adds a different taste to it.
2. Bring the water to boil, then add the salted vegetables, sliced ginger and sour plum to flavour the soup (if you like you may also wanna add 4-5 whole garlic). Only add the tomatoes, spring onions last as they cook very quickly.
3. For the bee hoon, I use laksa bee hoon from NTUC and one packet feeds about 4 people easily. Boil the noodles first and then add it to the soup. The trick is to prepare everything ready and then adding it together to make the dish.
Serving Suggestion:
You can either add the fish into the soup when you prepare the noodles or not. It’s up to you. I prefer not so that I can taste the crispiness of the fish slices.
As an alternative, you can add chye sim, although I prefer to add thinly sliced bitter gourd to give it that extra taste.
That’s it, perfect!
Bon Appetit!
Usually I would end here with “Bon Appetit!”, but there is a YouTube video with my look-alike Adrian Pang and the very lovely Michelle Chia, and incidentally they are both promoting Sliced Fish Bee Hoon, so what the heck:
At times when taking the taxi, the uncle instead takes you for a ride. That happens to me more often then I would like to be honest.
I have motion sickness, and that doesn’t help me very much when I take public transport. Especially with the taxi cab. It can be equivalent to a roller coaster ride sometimes.
Besides that I would typically snooze off into a relatively deep sleep.
So in this instance, I too fell asleep and when I opened my eyes again, I was near johor baru. I asked the uncle why he brought me all the way out to the north when in reality he could have exited much earlier.
He conveniently said “I asked you just now and you said go further north.”
Of course I said no such thing. Then I told the uncle to go back to where he should be going. Which he did and when I finally got home it was $30+ just for a journey that would have cost much less.
My wife and I love ginseng flavored black chicken soup, especially the one bought by my dad from this stall at Jalan Bersih Hawker Centre. They also sell the best turtle soup I believe in Singapore.
Black chicken soup is also very nutritious and good for new mothers during confinement month. It is generally regarded as a delicacy. Very easy to cook and best if you double-boil it. Of course double boiling just means that it will take a while longer.
I usually buy the black chicken fresh from the chicken butcher at the wet market. He will help chop the chicken into pieces really fast and neatly. I usually get him to chop into four pieces but you get him to chop into six parts.
The herbal mix of ginseng and other berries and roots I usually get the pre-packed ones from NTUC supermarkets. The items there are sufficient for what I need to do and it is fairly fuss free. Alternatively you can also buy the herbs from shops like Hock Hua as they would carry the entire range or grades of herbs.
Preparation time for this soup took just 30 minutes to prepare but if you have more time it would be good to simmer the chicken till the meat falls off the bones. Try it.
Recipe – serving for two
Ingredients
Black chicken
Pre-packed ginseng herbal chicken mix
Sea salt
Method
1. Place the chopped chicken in a large pot. Add the herbs into the pot. Add a litre of water. Add quarter teaspoon of salt. Boil high heat until the flavor of the chicken and the herbs comes through.
2. Then turn down the heat and slow cook till the meat is just tender.
I am also starting OTS aka “one take sessions” on anything that might be remotely useful for people that stumble upon this blog. Also, it is more for me because I really really want to know how to chop chickens properly.
I got to admit it, I am bad at chopping chickens. I don’t know where to pull or where to chop. Sometimes the simplest of cuts can become a massacre of epic proportions. I wish I have the wisdom of the chicken butcher when it comes to cuts and then a brilliant idea popped into my mind.
Ask the chicken butcher at the market to do a demonstration. It’s not the most exciting of videos, but it’s a great “how-to” video. A fantastic OTS. Enjoy.
I woke up one night and felt this insane craving to make my own Runny Egg Yolk hard-boiled egg. And almost as quickly, I immediately whipped out my trusty Nokia e71 (Yup, that was how long ago this recipe was inspired) and googled the recipe online. It was undoubtedly the most rewarding experience because now I have Runny Egg Yolk hard-boiled eggs for my maggi noodles.
I think the inspiration for this largely stemmed from eating out at one of those Japanese Ramen shops, most notably the one at the entrance of Cuppage Plaza in town. The Char Siew Ramen was simply delightful, and the runny egg yolk that accompanied it was simply awesome!
Recipe – serving for one
Ingredient
1 Large Egg (55g) <<That’s it! *wide grin*>>
Method
1. Fill a sauce-pan pot with water till midway or until you can cover the egg(s). Bring the water to a boil.
2. When the water is boiling, place the egg into the pot with a ladle making sure that the egg does not break in the pot. Ideally the egg should be at room temperature when it is placed in.
3. Boil the egg for about 6 minutes using a watch to keep time. Afterwhich, you ladle the egg out of the sauce-pan pot and let it cool in cold tap water. This process helps the egg to stop cooking even after you have taken it out of the boiling pot.
The whole process shouldn’t take you more than 15 minutes and you should be able to eat the eggs immediately! Look at the glorious golden yellow yolk! Serve with a little sea salt or black soya sauce.
Tāngyuán is a kind of Chinese dessert made from glutinous rice flour and is mixed with a small amount of water to form balls and is then cooked and served in boiling water spiced with old ginger and castor sugar. It typically comes in one plain white colour, but some families have chosen to add a little food colouring to make the dessert a little prettier.
Culturally for many families in China and also migrant families overseas, it is a meal eaten together. The round shape of the balls served in round bowls symbolises family togetherness. Tāngyuán translated means “Round Dumplings in Soup”.
I got this recipe from my mother-in-law, and this is how it works.
Recipe – serving for a family
Method
1) Add 400g glutinous flour with 350ml water. Add the water slowly so that the dough mixture will not be too moist. If you accidentally added too much water, just simply balance it out with more glutinous flour.
2) Knead the mixture into dough. Then pinch a little and roll it in between your fingers. If the dough were to crack, it just means that it is too dry. If the dough ball does not hold its shape, then there is too much moisture in the pastry.
3) Divide into the dough into two (02) portions and with one portion, add a few droplets of food colouring – Cherry Red is good – and then knead the food colouring into the dough. The whole dough should now be pink in colour.
4) Put each portion of dough into a plastic bag and place them in the freezer for 30 minutes.
5) Remove from the freezer and begin to roll. (if however, after freezing the dough is too dry, just simply dap it with a little water.
6) Put the balls in boiling water, until they all start to float. Then off the fire and allow the dough balls to sit in the broth for about 5 minutes.
7) Scoop out the dough balls with a ladle and put them inside a bowl of cool tap water.
8) Prepare 300g castor sugar and put into the broth to boil a little, after which place slices of old ginger and pandan leaves into the soup and bring the soup to a boil.
9) Ladle the dough balls into the broth and allow them to sit in the fragrant mixture until the flavour has infused into the dough balls.
10) Allow the dessert to sit in the broth overnight, and when ready to eat, just heat up the soup and serve.
I thought that it wouldn’t be fair to do a review of the Qiji interpretation of the humble nasi lemak (I think they glorified it) but not do the heartland version.
So here goes. This is well and truly a more humbled version. It is so no frills I had no trouble identifying everything within the packet in a nano-glance. All I did was blink and that was the end of my meal. I saw in my mind’s eye exactly how I would chow down this plate and it was unglamorous.
My wife saw my somewhat bewildered expression and immediately offered some Belinjo crackers that she had bought earlier, just to make up the color. It sort of looked slightly better after that. But there was just too much white (rice) and not much of anything else.
This is truly the cookie cutter version with just the ikan bilis and kacang goreng all sealed in individual packets. This nasi lemak reeks of industrial kitchen-ness. Everything seems to be commoditized, right down to the chilli. All sealed ready to be assembled in a production factory-like style.
I had to top up 50 cents for a piece of otah-otah which kind of made it a little better. The only other thing that was not from the industrial kitchen was probably the kuning fish. Interestingly this fella was even smaller than the previous one.
I was so tempted to make my own masterpiece that I assembled the kuning fish as if like jumping out of a sea of nasi. Kids, don’t do this at home.
I guess you could say I was reasonably bored with my unflattering breakfast. Alright, to be fair what would one be expecting for $1.60 (SGD), by far it was the cheapest nasi lemak I have eaten in a long while. And it was just as delicious as the glorified version.
